Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90040
Jorge Poveda Yánez
Are commemorative plaques enough to collectively and symbolically amend the horror of human rights violations? And if not, why is this strategy still the most common way for governments to pay their due respects to the families of the victims? This paper analyzes the suitability of the arts to address the reparation of the victims of human rights-related crimes perpetrated in Ecuador between 1983 and 2008, as investigated by the ad-hoc Truth Commission installed there afterwards. National and constitutional law, as well as international jurisprudence, will help to illuminate this study objective. Furthermore, in order to unpack the collective and individual dimensions of the right to memory of the victims, their families and their broader social fabric in which they are embedded, the notion of ‘memory sites’ is incorporated into the analysis. To contribute to the establishment of interconnections between the law and the arts, several initiatives for the recovery of memory in Ecuador are reviewed, from a critical stance. In this vein, the text foregrounds a centralizing proposal to consolidate an Ecuadorian aesthetics of memory, through institutionalization and museography, to address the governmental duty for reparations; but more importantly, to finally permeate the consciousness of an entire country whose past is still waiting to be incorporated into its present. By intertwining the legal, the artistic and the political layers present in this discussion, we advance in the direction of an aesthetics of memory that challenges the dominant narratives of genocidal violence.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90038
Kate Seear, Sean Mulcahy
When new legislation comes before parliament, it is often referred to a scrutiny committee that undertakes detailed examination of the proposed law. The meetings of parliamentary scrutiny committees are often held behind closed doors and provide an opportunity for parliamentarians and their advisors to exchange views on the impacts of proposed laws, including their impacts on human rights. Responding to Lisa Samuels’ (72) provocation “to take encounter as a work” and to research on law as performance, this paper examines these moments of encounter as legal performances. We argue that these meetings, comings-together and encounters do the work of (per)forming human rights assessments of legislation. We also question how the spaces of committee meetings, the absence of an outside audience, and the differing levels of knowledge on the part of parliamentary actors affect the performance of human rights scrutiny.
{"title":"Backstage Performances of Parliamentary Scrutiny, or Coming Together in Parliamentary Committee Rooms","authors":"Kate Seear, Sean Mulcahy","doi":"10.21825/documenta.90038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/documenta.90038","url":null,"abstract":"When new legislation comes before parliament, it is often referred to a scrutiny committee that undertakes detailed examination of the proposed law. The meetings of parliamentary scrutiny committees are often held behind closed doors and provide an opportunity for parliamentarians and their advisors to exchange views on the impacts of proposed laws, including their impacts on human rights. Responding to Lisa Samuels’ (72) provocation “to take encounter as a work” and to research on law as performance, this paper examines these moments of encounter as legal performances. We argue that these meetings, comings-together and encounters do the work of (per)forming human rights assessments of legislation. We also question how the spaces of committee meetings, the absence of an outside audience, and the differing levels of knowledge on the part of parliamentary actors affect the performance of human rights scrutiny.","PeriodicalId":504466,"journal":{"name":"Documenta","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139169268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90037
Rocío Zamora-Sauma
In this article, I confront distinctions between fiction and reality in the Ixil Trial in Guatemala (2013), considering the relationship between theater, justice, and law. To this end, I argue that there is a parasitic relationship between theater and the law. Although theater has influenced the mechanisms of the judicial or accusatorial system in the twentieth century, trials, in themselves, constitute theatrical forms. Transitional justice, which limits my approach to a broad spectrum of judicial rituals, has shaped its very own canon. I argue that it is through an analysis of the theatrical elements of these trials that it is possible to unpack the distinctions between law and justice.
{"title":"Performing Institutions: Trials as Part of the Canon of Theatrical Traditions","authors":"Rocío Zamora-Sauma","doi":"10.21825/documenta.90037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/documenta.90037","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I confront distinctions between fiction and reality in the Ixil Trial in Guatemala (2013), considering the relationship between theater, justice, and law. To this end, I argue that there is a parasitic relationship between theater and the law. Although theater has influenced the mechanisms of the judicial or accusatorial system in the twentieth century, trials, in themselves, constitute theatrical forms. Transitional justice, which limits my approach to a broad spectrum of judicial rituals, has shaped its very own canon. I argue that it is through an analysis of the theatrical elements of these trials that it is possible to unpack the distinctions between law and justice.","PeriodicalId":504466,"journal":{"name":"Documenta","volume":"1114 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139169967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90036
F. Korsten
This article compares theatrical courtroom provocations by leftist activists and militants in the 1960s and 1970s with recent ‘bad faith’ actions in court by the American right-wing activist Alex Jones. The article proposes that law’s theatrical way of showing a general audience how the judiciary aims to serve justice is annoyed but not threatened by defendants acting the fool. The reason is that acting the fool provokes a confrontation between two different kinds of theater in court. In this confrontation, the agonistic logic of the court case is still operative, with the law embodying power and the accused acting as its carnivalesque challenger. When the accused acts in bad faith, however, there is a double confrontation, namely inside and outside the court. Those acting in bad faith are what Johan Huizinga defines as spoilsports who pretend to play the game while aiming to destroy it. The article considers how the spoilsport manifests itself in and outside of court through contemporary media and concludes that the theatrical nature of the judiciary needs protection in order to do justice to victims.
{"title":"The Judiciary’s Theatrical Achilles’ Heel: Acting the Fool (RAF members) compared to Acting in Bad Faith (Alex Jones)","authors":"F. Korsten","doi":"10.21825/documenta.90036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/documenta.90036","url":null,"abstract":"This article compares theatrical courtroom provocations by leftist activists and militants in the 1960s and 1970s with recent ‘bad faith’ actions in court by the American right-wing activist Alex Jones. The article proposes that law’s theatrical way of showing a general audience how the judiciary aims to serve justice is annoyed but not threatened by defendants acting the fool. The reason is that acting the fool provokes a confrontation between two different kinds of theater in court. In this confrontation, the agonistic logic of the court case is still operative, with the law embodying power and the accused acting as its carnivalesque challenger. When the accused acts in bad faith, however, there is a double confrontation, namely inside and outside the court. Those acting in bad faith are what Johan Huizinga defines as spoilsports who pretend to play the game while aiming to destroy it. The article considers how the spoilsport manifests itself in and outside of court through contemporary media and concludes that the theatrical nature of the judiciary needs protection in order to do justice to victims.","PeriodicalId":504466,"journal":{"name":"Documenta","volume":"246 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139169104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90031
Lily Climenhaga
Since the founding of the International Institute of Political Murder in 2008, Swiss German theater-maker Milo Rau has gained international attention for his political theater projects. ‘(P(Re))Forming Justice: Milo Rau’s Trials and Tribunals’ looks specifically at Rau’s trial and tribunal projects: The Moscow Trials (2013), The ZurichTrials (2013), and The Congo Tribunal (2015). It engages with the intersection of the political and the affective in Rau’s re-temporalization of necessary but ultimately non-existent institutions to create utopian, affective institutions that serve as demonstrative alternatives to those of the present. In uncovering the connection between the aesthetic references of affect and politic, this article connects three performance elements within Rau’s projects: (1) the political impulses of these constructed, temporary institutions, (2) their affective power, and (3) the concept and question of justice. Bringing the anarchist concept of prefiguration, Frans-Willem Korsten’s apathy, Olivia Landry’s Theater of Anger, and Robert Walter-Jochum’s Theater of Outrage into contact with affect, this article uncovers how Rau’s tribunal theatre, in its creation of a jurisdiction located in the future – a prefiguration for what these spaces should look like – serves as a call to justice that breaks with the apathy of the present.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90041
Steff Nellis
This special issue of Documenta delves into the reciprocal relationship between ‘Theater and Law,’ establishing an interdisciplinary space for justice that transcends conventional legal boundaries. In contrast to traditional, rigid judicial frameworks that revolve around accusing and sentencing clearly defined defendants, the performing and visual arts provide a reflective environment for reevaluating legal cases and systems. Each article in this issue aspires to reconceptualize established legal perspectives by presenting artistically inspired alternatives. The contributions illustrate how the performing and visual arts foster empathetic and progressive alternatives to the judicial process, both within and beyond traditional court settings. To underscore the significance of these artistically inspired alternatives, this introduction examines the tragic case of Sanda Dia, a twenty-year-old student who died during an extreme initiation ritual from a student corps at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2018.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90029
Kfir Lapid-Mashall
This article introduces a pathway for considering the political in theatrical performances which simulate an open and undetermined judicial proceeding directed at an audience, here termed Theatrical Mock Trials. The article presents a definition of the mock trial as an educational practice, decodes its theatricality, and discusses its pedagogical benefits in developing political insight and critical thinking. Employing the logic of the mock trial, the article proposes conceptualizing Theatrical Mock Trials through their postdramatic open dramaturgy. This dramaturgy, it is argued, devises a space within such theatrical trials for the emergence of the real, and by that provokes critical spectatorship. The article then analyses Milo Rau’s The Moscow Trials (2013) as a Theatrical Mock Trial and demonstrates how its open dramaturgy resulted in the irruption of real violence. Such dramaturgy of Theatrical Mock Trials, it is argued, engaged the audience in a political and critical surveying of the authoritative judicial mechanism.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90035
Marett Leiboff
Theatrical Jurisprudence tends to be thought of as a practice of law in its most visible setting – law displayed in the courtroom and rendered live and lively. Theatrical Jurisprudence, however, operates in a different register, a practice that animates the practice of law as something more than bare interpretation, making live and lively the unconscious interventions deployed by lawyers or judges to animate the bare and abstract forms of legal method found in legal doctrine, principle, or rule. Yet most lawyers and judges would vehemently deny that they do anything other than assess, analyse, or apply the law using those rigid reasoning techniques. In this essay, I suggest that law has to theatricalize in order to open up new spaces for justice and uncover some examples of the subtleties of that theatricalization – both good and bad.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90034
Klaas Tindemans
Legal philosopher Hans Lindahl argues that the regulation of immigration is, above all moral considerations, a political issue. When one tries to assess the problem of territorial boundaries – and their transgression – as a question of distributive justice, political philosophers easily mix, not even surreptitiously, moral arguments with political and legal considerations. Lindahl refers to Michael Walzer, who asserts the primacy of the community and consequently bounded justice, and to Jürgen Habermas, who’s idea of boundless justice makes the notion of a nation-state irrelevant: one world polity has, by definition, no boundaries and thus no immigration issues. But Lindahl replies that law, and immigration law in particular, is forced to create boundaries by its very nature. After all, law structurally defines diverse groups of interest, and the actions of individuals – belonging or not belonging to one group or another – are always placed or misplaced, i.e. situated inside or outside the realm of the law. Even a world legislature and a universal jurisdiction would have to decide who can claim her/his rights, or who cannot. But since law is also, by definition, contingent – it can be changed in any direction – the claim of distributive justice, as a form of moral pressure, cannot be discarded easily. It shouldn’t be discarded, to be sure, it should be politicized. In recent performances about immigration, the moral indignation has clearly had the upper hand, sometimes with a touch of cynicism. In Necropolis, Arkadi Zaides creates a fictitious city of the dead, where only those who died in their attempt to reach Europe are allowed. From a massive collection of data about the victims of Fortress Europe, his performance transforms into a horrifying portrait of their ‘human remains’. Het Salomonsoordeel, a documentary, participatory monologue by Ilay den Boer involves the audience in the moral dilemmas of the ‘decider’ of the Dutch immigration and asylum agency, where den Boer worked as an intern. In The Voice of Fingers, Thomas Bellinck confronts his friendship with asylum seeker Said Reza Adib with the harsh reality of migrants as ‘data subjects’, identified by their fingerprints. The question arises of whether artistic representations of immigration issues sufficiently tackle the political challenges of global mobility – in this collapsing world of (civil) wars, climate disasters, and economical inequalities – and the challenges it poses for the affluent societies we are living in. Is it possible, or even meaningful, for theater-makers to try to relate their compassion – as a moral sentiment – to the frameworks of contingent policies and, subsequently, to the strict taxonomies of legislation?
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Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.21825/documenta.90039
Sofia Nakou, Stephen Collins, Nii Kwartelai Quartey
Since 2018, Act for Change (AfC), a Ghanaian applied theater company, has been using Boalian theater techniques to address issues of modern slavery and human trafficking in their community. Here, using the framework of Boal’s Legislative Theater, we discuss the ways in which AfC has developed Boal’s work, innovating it within a specific context to find new and powerful ways of using performance to engage with intractable issues of modern slavery and human trafficking. Focussing on the specific dynamics of a single community, this article explores how employing a ‘hyperlocal’ approach in James Town, Accra, enables a focus on the local stories that highlight how modern slavery and human trafficking operate. More specifically, while using a Marxist-Freiran framework and by engaging with Augusto Boal’s concepts of Legislative and Forum Theater, this article focuses on how performance methodologies can engage with complex international issues by developing intra-local dialogue and partnerships at the local level. The goal here is not to argue that community action can act as a replacement for statutory instruments or state-led initiatives, but that they are a potentially significant and under-developed complementary tool in the fight against modern slavery, as they place the community and the survivor at the center of change. By taking this approach, we aim to reflect on how theories of legislative theater can aid the development of a hyperlocal methodology and how the project in James Town exemplifies modern legislative theater practice.
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